MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*
There's at least three other franchises named Van Helsing, and this one, by CGI-director BC Fourteen, may be the least of them.
I decided to sample this VH, though, because while researching XTERMINATOR for my review, I learned that the villainous robot made an appearance in VH, as well as (very briefly) the BC version of Bigfoot. But the great-grandson of Abraham Van Helsing, astronaut Jack Van Helsing, is the star here-- though he doesn't directly contend with either X or two other evil presences in the muddled story.
I made fun of the fact XTERMINATOR obviously swiped its basic plot from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, but VH might have been better with more story-theft. There's sort of an arc in that the script tells viewers that the Earth was turned into a wasteland in 2022, and by the end of VH, the hero returns to humankind's homeworld and sees that life has begun to thrive again. But this does not happen because of anything done by the hero or anyone else. VH is just a jumble of separate scenes that BC wanted to execute. Only in one way is VH better than its predecessor: VH has one decently executed fight-scene, where Jack in his spacesuit duels a similarly garbed enemy while both are floating in space. But BC partly undermines his own scene by capriciously naming Jack's opponent after the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau for no good reason I can see.
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